Saturday, January 8, 2011

As you can see, I've been making progress

I did these sketches of Katara today to get a feel of her character design. Since she's going to be the star of the Avatar: the Last Airbender comic I'm doing, I should definitely learn how to draw her right, and make her emote and act like a real cartoon human being. Boy, is she going to go through some Hell in my comic...

I'm going back to school tomorrow for the second semester, and this time I'll know exactly what to do as far as doing schoolwork and properly raping the facility of its resources. I'm glad I got most of the important outlines and developments for certain projects done during break, which means I can give my focus to those since I won't have enough time to devote proper attention to the less-than-solid ideas and stories.

It's a mighty fine coincidence that I happened to start reading The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History before seeing The Social Network: they're essentially the same story. Someone has a potentially brilliant idea for a [television show/computer network], and, after a lot of backsliding and betrayal, suddenly the idea turns into a success beyond the creator(s)' imaginations, which in turn leads to lawsuits about who actually deserves whatever amount of money for intellectual property theft. (Don't worry, I haven't spoiled anything.) History repeats itself, I guess, and the whole Facebook debacle and the creation of The Simpsons are solid proof of that. Anytime a cultural phenomenon happens, we all want to know who was the one person responsible for it. Facebook, The Simpsons, Star Wars, The Beatles, Youtube, whatever: these were all the product of their generation, and it took more than one person to realize how to transform that potential into the light of people's lives. So many countless, anonymous people have had their careers destroyed by these freak occurances, but you never hear about them.

Except in The Social Network, a film I honestly was skeptical about at first because: 1) it's a movie about the creation of Facebook? Lame!; 2) David "Fight Club" Fincher is directing? Why? I'm glad I was persuaded to see it. It's probably the most important film of this year, and a great one at that. Everyone should seriously see it. If anything, it's a shockingly entertaining film. And Jesse Eisenberg? Never knew the hapless nerd could play should a brilliant, yet almost despicable guy.

And while all this is going on, I'm seriously considering becoming an atheist. Reading up on The Simpsons and George Meyer, one of it's chief creative forces, certainly influenced this, but it was a long time coming anyway. That doesn't mean I'll be an asshole. There are enough assholes as it is. And besides, I'm not even remotely good at being an asshole. And thank God for that.